no degree owing to the scandal which Wycliffe's opponents
have discovered in his ejection by the archbishop of
Canterbury. So far as we can see, there was nothing
discreditable to either party in the transaction, and nothing
discreditable to the pope who dismissed Wycliffe's appeal,
or to the English king who confirmed the papal sentence.
It was simply a dispute, one of a kind that constantly
arose, between the secular and the regular clergy. At
the same time if the reformer be actually the person who
was thus deprived we shall no doubt be right in looking
upon this event in his personal history as one of the elements
which produced his subsequent rancour against the monastic system.
At whatever decision we arrive with respect to this affair, it remains certain that Wycliffe continued active in the Oxford schools ; and this is all that we are here concerned to know, since it was not until many years later that he became conspicuous as a leader of opposition to the established doctrine of the church. Yet even now he had made himself a name outside of Oxford. He was, it seems, a chaplain to the king, and had already entered the lists of controversy as an advocate, though in guarded terms, of the rights of the English nation as against the papal claim to tribute from it. In the tract to which we refer[1] he puts in the mouth of seven lords in council the arguments which might be urged against this claim; and to one of these speakers he gives the announcement of his own special doctrine of dominion. This was in
- ↑ The Determinatio quedam magistri Johannis Wyclyff de dominio is printed by Lewis, pp. 349-356; not however, as Dr. Lechler, vol. 2. 322 n. 1, seems to suggest, as an excerpt: its fragmentary condition is due to the manuscript itself, which is in the Bodleian library, arch. Seld. B. 26 [olim 10] ff. 54 sqq. I agree with Mr. F. D. Matthew, intr., p. vi, as against Shirley, intr., p. xix, Lechler, vol. 1. 330, and apparently Milman, vol. 8. 163, that this does not contain a report in the strict sense of the word. Wycliffe was very likely present at the debate in parliament; but even though he may give what he supposes that the lords said, or ought to have said, still the language, the arrangement, and a good deal of the argument, are unmistakably Wycliffe’s own. Wycliffe refers to the Responsio septem dominorum in his De civili dominio iii. 7 cod. Vindob. 1340 f. 41 B.
